Month: June 2007

I’m putting this down here (friends-locked) for two reasons: One, because I want to have a record of it — it makes it concrete, somehow. More ‘real.’ Two, because I’d like the people who can read this to know.

and I have been talking over the past couple of months, and we’ve decided that sometime around the spring or summer of 2009, we’re going to relocate to London.

A bunch of reasons for this, really. We had always planned on doing *something* once The Minion was successfully launched into university. We talked about buying a house here in Lawrence, or moving back to NYC. Something.

However, from the time I was a little kid, I always said that that “when I grow up, I’m going to be a writer and live in London.” The thought has been nagging at me, recently — and then I started to ask myself “why not?”

Since the whole cancer thing earlier this year, I’ve been struck by the fact that I’m sick and tired of simply “existing” — I want to start “living.” I want to do the things that I’ve always said that I’m going to do….instead of drifting along on the simple day-to-day bullshit. You do that, and before you know it, you turn around and another decade has gone by. The medical scare that I was blessed with in January showed me conclusively that “another decade” isn’t always guaranteed. That if I want to start “living”, I had better get off my ass and do it.

So, the plan is: Bust my ass on Adamant and on launching a fiction career. will do the same. Once we know where The Minion has been accepted, and how it’s being paid (thankfully, she’s a scholarship and grant magnet, and anything beyond that will be covered by Student Loans), we start the process of relocation, with a target date of the break between her Freshman and Sophomore years (which puts us as moving in May or June of 2009).

This gives us two years to get our ducks in a row, with a specific goal in mind: London in 2009, and, if all goes to plan, permanent residence and eventual naturalization by 2014, under the “writers, artists and musicians” visa.

So there you have it. Our goal. Friends here will have to put up with us for a couple more years, and friends in the UK have been adequately warned. :)

My thoughts on the two-parter from this week and last:

He burns at the center of Time and can see the turn of the Universe.

Steampunk Magazine is a magazine celebrating the steampunk aesthetic with fiction, art and articles. It’s available as a free PDF download, or in print direct from the publisher for $3.00 an issue. Very cool stuff.

Articles in the first two issues include:

An interview with Michael Moorcock,

A ‘how-to’ article on “electrolytic etching,”

An article on the environmental impact of coal,

How to build a Pennyfarthing bicycle.

“Steam Gear” fashion guide

…and tons of fiction.

Before the age of homogenization and micro-machinery, before the tyrannous efficiency of internal combustion and the domestication of electricity, lived beautiful, monstrous machines that lived and breathed and exploded unexpectedly at inconvenient moments. It was a time where art and craft were united, where unique wonders were invented and forgotten, and punks roamed the streets, living in squats and fighting against despotic governance through wit, will and wile.

Even if we had to make it all up.